In San Antonio last week, three federal judges heard testimony, yet again, that they will use to determine whether Texas House redistricting plans passed by the Republican-dominated Legislature in 2011 discriminated against black and Hispanic voters. Next month, the court is scheduled to hear debate regarding the congressional redistricting maps the Legislature passed in 2011. Challenges to the maps in 2013 are still to come.

In Florida earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that Republican lawmakers and political consultants had done precisely what Florida voters in 2010 had banned - that is, create legislative districts "with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent." The judge ruled that political operatives "made a mockery of the Legislature's transparent and open process of redistricting" while "going to great lengths to conceal from the public their plan and their participation in it."

In Austin, some day, Texas lawmakers finally will acknowledge that legislative control over redistricting is an implicit conflict of interest that undermines the effectiveness of representative government. Their enlightened response, some day, will be to institute some version of an independent citizen's commission designed to insulate the process from state and federal officials who are interested primarily not in nurturing the democratic process but in protecting their careers and promoting their party's access to power.

It could be a long time coming, given the fact that politicians are averse to ceding power, even when it's power to the people that they're surrendering. And yet a number of states, including Iowa, Arizona, California and New Jersey, have taken steps to inoculate themselves against the toxic nature of partisan gerrymandering. Those states have recognized that computer-empowered state lawmakers now can draw districts with such precision that they need never worry about being voted out of office. As a result, the vast majority of seats in the U.S. House are not competitive, and, because officeholders don't have to acknowledge dissenting views, more and more of them represent the most extreme elements of their districts.

"Redistricting will never be perfectly fair, or divorced from political considerations," New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin noted last week in a report about the Florida case, "but the best solution, by far, seems to be vesting the power to draw lines in bipartisan commissions."

We agree. The commissions, as Toobin notes, "have the greatest chance of creating electoral districts that are reasonably compact and competitive instead of the attenuated pieces that are drawn to bring certain voters in and keep others out."

In Texas, former state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, a San Antonio Republican, regularly introduced legislation to take the redistricting process out of the hands of his fellow lawmakers. Although his efforts, beginning in 1993, earned him the label R-La Mancha, he came close in 2009. Three years later, he fell to a challenger from the far right, and his crusade, however quixotic, fell with him.

The senator may have been tilting at windmills, but as our political system grows more dysfunctional with each passing year, we would like to think that the people of Texas will rise up, heed his call and demand change from their elected representatives. Some day.